I’m an author, journalist and one of the UK’s social media pioneers. Here I write about publishing, self-publishing and crowdfunding.
I am also the author of Argleton, a novelette about a mysterious town that appears on digital maps but doesn’t exist in reality. I self-published via Kickstarter and Amazon Kindle, and am negotiating my way through the publishing world and exploring new business models for entrepreneurial authors along the way.
As a freelance journalist, I have written about social media and technology for FirstPost.com, The Guardian, CIO Magazine and Computer Weekly.

Fake Reviews: Amazon's Rotten Core

The web has created some fantastic opportunities for authors, publishers and self-publishers alike, but this summer has seen the industry’s dark underbelly revealed in all its venal, pustulant ignominy. Things kicked off in July at the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival where successful author Stephen Leather confessed, during an on-stage panel discussion, that he used fake accounts to promote his own books. This admission of sockpuppetry shocked the writing community and has been covered well by fellow panellistSteve Mosby.

UPDATED 29 August (see below for details).

Leather admitted to creating accounts on forums under assumed names in order to “create a buzz” about his own work. He also promotes and reviews his work using at least one pseudonymous Twitter account. In Leather’s own words, transcribed from a recording of the panel:

I’ll go onto several forums, from the well-known forums, and post there, under my own name and under various other names and various other characters. You build this whole network of characters who talk about your books and sometimes have conversations with yourself. And then I’ve got enough fans…

Leather is not the only one promoting his own work through pseudonymous accounts. On 25 August, the New York Times revealed that the use of fake reviews is widespread. In exploring the case of reviewer-for-hire Todd Jason Rutherford, the NY Times exposed self-publishing poster boy John Locke who bought 300 reviews from Rutherford’s business, GettingBookReviews, spending about $6,000 to do so:

One thing that made a difference [to Locke’s sales] is not mentioned in [his best-selling guide to self-publishing] “How I Sold One Million E-Books.” That October, Mr. Locke commissioned Mr. Rutherford to order reviews for him, becoming one of the fledging service’s best customers. “I will start with 50 for $1,000, and if it works and if you feel you have enough readers available, I would be glad to order many more,” he wrote in an Oct. 13 e-mail to Mr. Rutherford. “I’m ready to roll.”

Mr. Locke was secure enough in his talents to say that he did not care what the reviews said. “If someone doesn’t like my book,” he instructed, “they should feel free to say so.” He also asked that the reviewers make their book purchases directly from Amazon, which would then show up as an “Amazon verified purchase” and increase the review’s credibility.

Rutherford’s venture collapsed when Google stopped him advertising his services and Amazon pulled many, although not all, of his reviews from their system. But that hasn’t put a stop to false reviews.

Indeed, many authors will recognise the phenomenon of the malicious one-star review designed to sabotage their book. Although Amazon prohibits “spiteful remarks” it is difficult to get such reviews removed. There’s absolutely no doubt that some of these reviews are coming from other authors who see self-publishing as a zero sum game in which if they lose out if another author does well. Others may come from an author’s fans who see anyone else’s success as a threat to their idol, or from griefers and trolls who just get off on attacking strangers in public.

When I spoke to Smashwords’ Mark Coker about this last month, he said:

It’s a flaw in the system that negativity can become so amplified. You can have a string of four and five star reviews, and then you get a string of one star reviews and it will torpedo your sales, because people will see those most recent reviews and it’s a warning sign to the potential readers. […] If there’s a reviewer that only leaves one star reviews, or if they’ve left nothing but a single negative review, they’re a carpet-bomber.

Carpet-bombers do not leave negative reviews in order to help readers avoid a bad book, they do it to undermine the reader’s confidence in positive reviews, damage the book’s ranking in Amazon and thus that author’s sales. They are, like fake positive reviews, designed to game the system. Explains author Robert Kroese:

The effect of a bad review goes far beyond the impact that it has on the author’s ego, however. The prominence of a book on Amazon.com is determined primarily by two factors: how well the book has sold and how positive its reviews are. More highly rated books are displayed more prominently, which leads to more sales. Increased sales leads to even more prominent display, which leads to still more sales. Through the miracle of the positive review snowball effect, a few hundred rave reviews can transform an otherwise unremarkable book into a worldwide bestseller.

The faking of reviews, both positive and negative, is a serious issue. At the core of the problem is the fact that there are huge benefits to behaving unethically but very little cost for those caught doing so. Stephen Leather and John Locke are unlikely to find their sales damaged by this furore. There is no motivation for them to clean up their acts and every motivation for them to continue behaving unethically. (Leather disputes that he faked reviews but has admitted to promoting his work through a pseudonymous Twitter account that he says disclosed his identity in the profile. He disagrees that this practice is unethical).

Unfortunately, there is also no motivation for Amazon, or other online booksellers, to clean up their own acts. Amazon exists to sell stuff. They will only begin to care about this if it starts to threaten sales, despite the fact that they could, if they wanted to, make it much harder for people to fake reviews. Kroese again:

Locke couldn’t have pulled off this fraud without some complicity from Amazon.com, however. Amazon.com has access to loads of information that is not available to the consumer (such as the IP addresses of reviewers and their purchase histories) that could help them identify fraudulent reviews and ban reviewers with a history of fraud. Sudden bursts of reviews (as happened with Locke) should also have sent up some red flags in Seattle. There’s simply no excuse for letting Locke get away with these sorts of shenanigans.

Google has, as Kroese points out, put a lot of time and effort into combatting attempts to game its search algorithm. There’s no reason at all why Amazon couldn’t devote more time and effort to combatting fake reviews. Indeed, Coker suggested that Amazon should “analyse the patterns and review behaviour of individual reviewers, and develop a credibility algorithm” to improve its ranking algorithms and minimise the damage done by fake and malicious reviews.

Yet the mood among authors I’ve spoken to is pessimistic. No one believes that Amazon will step up to the plate unless forced, so how do we force Amazon to act? How do we create a genuine cost to unethical behaviour? As Locke has shown, the rewards for being a review cheat are huge and the risks negligible. And, as a community, there’s almost nothing we can do to combat fake and malicious reviews even when we spot them.

At the end of his blog post, Mosby asks what we should do about the problem. Suggestions include petitions to convince Amazon to act; open letters from official bodies such as the Society of Authors; encouraging more readers to write genuine reviews; and getting higher profile coverage that might embarrass Amazon into acting. At this point, I don’t think there’s a silver bullet, short of Amazon and their competitors suffering a sudden rush of ethical blood to the head, so I’d advocate doing all of the above. What would you add to the list? And of those suggestions, where would you start? As a community, I feel that we have to act, because this shoddy behaviour affects all of us, readers and writers alike.

UPDATED 29 AugustIn the comments, Stephen Leather has pointed out that he did not publicly admit to writing fake reviews on Amazon. The actual extent of Leather’s sockpuppetry is impossible to assess, although he did say in Harrogate that he has a network of friends and friends-of-friends who help “create a buzz” and whose relationship to Leather is unknown to the reader. Again, from Steve Mosby’s transcript of a recording of the panel:

Steve Mosby: So you use sockpuppet accounts basically?

Stephen Leather: I think everyone does. Everyone does. Or I have friends who are sockpuppets, who might be real, but they might pick a fight with me.

SM: Are your readers aware of this, or…?

SL: Well, I think that everyone … well, are the readers aware of it? No … But they’re not buying it because of the sockpuppet. What you’re trying to do is create a buzz. And it’s very hard, one person, surrounded by a hundred thousand other writers, to create a buzz. I mean, that’s one of the things that publishers do. They create a buzz. One person on their own, difficult to create a buzz. If you’ve got ten friends, and they’ve got friends, and you can get them all as one creating a buzz, then hopefully you’ll be all right.

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I’ve been a victim of a carpet-bomber on Amazon, as have many other authors I know. Several of these serial-negative reviewers have been brought to the attention of Amazon, but Amazon rarely acts on the concerns of the authors. Some authors are researching legal possibilities to see if an attorney can get a court order for Amazon to reveal the private info of carpet-bombers so that they can be sued for libel. If the initial cases are successful, many authors will jump on board. I have opted to pull my works from Amazon, while keeping them available elsewhere, plus traditional publishing. Until independent authors form a strong union, where they can negotiate or threaten to pull most indie author’s works from the website, they will forever be at the mercy of large corporations.

Amazon’s lack of action on this matter is a huge problem, and I’d be very interested to know more about any legal action that might be taken. I think that the libel laws would only be applicable in a very small number of cases, but Amazon might be persuaded to take some action in the face of a lawsuit. It would be a shame if that’s what it came to, though.

And yes, there’s also the issue of independent authors not having any credible kind of representation, and that’s a thorny problem in and of itself.

I agree but Amazon should clean out their dirty stables. They are complicit in allowing fake reviews from so-called reviewers. One , Robert Magee, attacks any writer that writes on Thais and Thailand. He copies and pastes his comments to different posts changing one word. His latest ploy is to re-name himself with my name! Every post he makes gets approved as contributing to the discussion, presumably by his little group. I’ve complained to Amazon. Nothing.

Amazon has removed his review. It helped that when he changed his name to my pen name, he also put his location as Thailand. Thai Immigration asked Amazon if Robert Magee was now in Thailand as shown on his post. Five hours later, the posts and review were removed. Amazon is a jungle and you need to use “law of the jungle” tactics to deal with them. Amazon floored the UK government over the tax issues but you don’t mess with Immigration authorities, particularly in a country like Thailand.

I use to be upset about the reviews, but now they don’t bother me anymore. People still read my work and this is what matters. Even if one person reads my work that is enough for me. I’m happy that at least someone has read my work.

Thanks for the mention! When I talk to people about this problem, someone inevitably says, “I don’t read reviews anyway” or “I never trust 5-star reviews.” Even if this is true (which I doubt), it’s beside the point: you can only evaluate products that you know about, and if a product has lousy reviews (or very few reviews), you are unlikely to ever see it, because Amazon places well-reviewed items higher up in the search results. Saying you aren’t affected by reviews on Amazon is like saying you aren’t affected by Google’s search algorithm. You may not be *aware* of how it affects you, but you can be damn sure it does.

Part of the effort to stem fake reviews’ undeserved impact (whether laudatory or deleterious) on authors and their books has to be educating potential readers which reviews merit serious attention, and which don’t. It’s not so difficult a feat to distinguish a legitimate review from a spurious one, if a potential reader recognizes the latter’s tell-tale signs. I wrote about the topic not long ago at http://rgazala.blogspot.com/2012/02/spotting-fake-online-book-reviews.html

It’s much less about readers developing critical thinking skills, and much more about the way that star ratings and reviews affect Amazon’s ranking of a book. Bad reviews means a low ranking which means damaged sales, and the opposite is true of good reviews, so they really have much more of an effect than just putting off a few readers here and there. Rob Kroese’s comparison to Google is really a very good one.

As a crime writer, I’ve had my share of mixed reviews. Like most writers, I’ve learned to take the negative reviews on the chin. It goes with the job, apparently. Fortunately, even the negative reviews gave me a three star on Amazon, until one day I received one star. No big deal. I can live with it, being thick-skinned However, when I read the review (I know. Silly me) I realized the person hadn’t actually read the book, as the review was riddle with mistakes, wrong names, places etc. Worse was to follow when I discovered the person was another writer! Perhaps I had said something in the book to offend him? I don’t know. What I do know was that it became a learning curve for me.